w00t! VMware Tools for Nested ESXi!

I have been working with Nested ESXi since it original inception and this technology has greatly benefited me and the entire VMware community, especially when it comes to learning about VMware software and being able to easily prototype something before installing it on actual hardware. However, one thing that I felt that has been missing for awhile now is the ability to run an instance of VMware Tools within a Nested ESXi VM. I have personally been asking for this feature for a couple of years and I know many in the VMware community have expressed interests as well.

Once the VIB has been successfully installed, you will need to reboot the host for the changes to take effect. To verify, you can now login to either your vSphere Web/C# Client and you should now see the status for VMware Tools for your Nested ESXi host showing green and the IP Address of the Nested ESXi host should be displayed.

So why would you want to do this? Well, there’s a couple of reasons actually. The first one is pretty basic, which is when I need to reboot or shutdown a Nested ESXi VM, instead of having to jump into the VM console or SSH into ESXi host, I could just right click in the vSphere Web/C# Client and just say shutdown or reboot. I also tend to do all sorts of craziness in my lab (I’m sure this is an understatement for folks that know me) and may often break networking connectivity to my Nested ESXi VM. In vSphere 5.0, we introduced the Guest Operations API (formally known as VIX API) which is now part of the vSphere API. This API is actually quite handy as it allows you to perform guest operations within the VM without needing network connectivity as it relies on the fact that VMware Tools is running (pretty cool stuff!).

Here is a screenshot demonstrating the executing of vmkfstools through the Guest Operations API to one of my Nested ESXi VM:

A couple of things to note:

If you install VMware Tools on Nested ESXi VM, you will NOT be able to just right click in the UI and say install/upgrade

If you wish to integrate this into you ESXi image, you can take a look at a community tool called ESXi-Customizer created by Andreas Peetz which I have used in the past and works great. Image Builder does not support raw VIBs, only zip files which may need to contain additional metadata information. If you want to create an offline bundle instead to then use Image Builder to create your custom ISO, Andreas has a new tool you can take a look at here.

Finally, if you have any feedback (likes/dis-likes), thanks, comments please head over to the VMware's Fling page for VMware Tools for Nested ESXi and leave a comment. I am sure the Jim Mattson the engineer who built this Fling would greatly appreciate any feedback you may have.

Looks like this might be some type of odd “caching”, we already have a report of it on the communities https://communities.vmware.com/message/2311487#2311487 Engineering will take a look and hopefully have an update soon, however it is installed and running but just not displaying it in the UI/API

I am experiencing a similar problem to what some are seeing. The difference that I have noticed is that failure only happens to some of my nested ESXi hosts. An observation (could be a coiencidence), that tools start on my i7-3840QM and E3-1245 processors (Workstation 10 and ESXi 5.1.0 (799733)) just fine and failed to start on E5-2630 (ESXi 5.1.0 (799733)). I also observed that I needed to use the –no-sig-check switch when installing the vib on the nested hosts on the E5-2630 machine.

Below is a snippet from the /var/log/syslog.log file of vmtoolsd failing to start. Thoughts?

I’m doing something a bit different – running ESXi 5.5U2 and vCenter 5.5U2e (Version 5.5.0 Build 2414847) both as guests under Fusion 7.1.1 Pro. The ESXi guest is unable to sync it’s clock to the Fusion clock. It appears the the vmtoolsd is running:

~ # ps | grep tool
35167 35167 vmtoolsd /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd

But Fusion is not syncing the clock, so perhaps they are incompatible versions. I have the vCenter and ESXi hosts on a private VLAN under Fusion, so internet services like ntpd are unavailable.

I don’t think its the incompatible version but potentially that VMware Tools for Nested ESXi may not contain the necessary code for for time sync as it is not the full blown VMware Tools, so it only exposes very basic functionality such as viewing IP Information and being able to run Guest Operations. You will probably have to point your ESXi VM to valid NTP source such as 0.pool.ntp.org unless you have a local NTP instance running

Hi Walter – I have ntpd configured now, but it when I suspend/resume the esxi host under fusion, it restarts with the date the machine was suspended. Eventually, ntpd corrects it, but it can take a long time.

However, if you shut it down and reboot it later, then ntpd will correct the time when it starts up. So the trick is to always shut it down (at least until we have vmware tools that can do the time sync correctly).

[…] William has also published a good post about how the VIX component, now called Guest operations API, which can leverage the use of VMware tools only to execute actions inside the VM (so no network connectivity is necessary), and allows more than just shutdown or reboots… Read William’s article here. […]

[…] with VMware Tools when running Nested ESXi. This means you no longer have to manually install the VMware Tools for Nested ESXi but ESXi will be able to automatically detect that it is running inside of a VM and automatically […]

[…] did I find out that there was a known issue with the VMware Tools for Nested ESXi, both the installable VIB and the pre-installed version in ESXi 6.0 on how the guest operations are executed. The good news […]

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William Lam is a Staff Solutions Architect working in the VMware Cloud on AWS team within the Cloud Platform Business Unit (CPBU) at VMware. He focuses on Automation, Integration and Operation of the VMware Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC).